


please let me be on the moon

by witching



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Bad Parenting, Banter, Canon Compliant, Childhood, Childhood Trauma, Depression, Fluff, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Identity Issues, Jewish Character, Jewish Martin Blackwood, Literary References & Allusions, Literature, Loneliness, Love, M/M, Names, Poetry, Post-Season/Series 03, Pre-Canon, Season/Series 03, Season/Series 05, Trans Male Character, Trans Martin Blackwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27388636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witching/pseuds/witching
Summary: Nobody ever listened to Martin. He was written off as a pest, a burden, an undesirable fixture by those around him. He was sent to his room without supper. He missed the important things. He wished he was strong and brave like Merricat, wished he had the initiative to do what needed to be done, but he was never quite sure what that would mean for him.Martin had always thought, quietly, that his life might have been easier if he'd had a sister. Or money. Or a cat. Not that he envied Merricat's life, but... he did, a bit. There were those core differences that made Martin feel bitter and misunderstood at times, but more often than not, Mary Katherine was a comfort to him, the closest thing he had to a friend. So he turned to her when he was lost and confused.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 17
Kudos: 56





	1. i was pretending that i did not speak their language

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is essentially a character study exploring martin's life through the lens of shirley jackson's _we have always lived in the castle._ you don't have to have read the book to read this fic, but it would definitely be helpful. the important stuff is (spoilers but the book came out over fifty years ago): the narrator/protagonist of the book is named mary katherine "merricat" blackwood, she killed her parents, she and her older sister constance are alone in the world and very codependent. it's a book about loneliness and isolation and magic and ghosts and fear and judgment and abandonment and i have a lot of feelings about it and i have a lot of feelings about martin and i think martin has a lot of feelings about the book and that is what this fic is about. thank you for coming to my ted talk.

_i. i was pretending that i did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world._

* * *

On an ordinary Sunday morning when Martin Blackwood was nine years old, four strange men came to his home and started taking a lot of things away. He didn't know why, and nobody told him, and he didn't ask. It was raining, which wasn't unusual; he'd have been more surprised if it hadn't been raining, but somehow the fact that it was raining still stuck in his mind, made an impression that stayed with him for years and years after the fact. 

He sat in his room most of the day, staring out the window at the rain and the men going in and out and in and out and in and out of the building. He opened up his weathered copy of _We Have Always Lived in the Castle_ – he’d gotten attached to the story far too young, lost himself in the tale of loneliness and fear and magic where the characters shared his surname – and pretended to try to read it, but ended up pouting to himself and thinking about how much of himself he saw in the story, and how much of the story he didn’t see in himself. 

Nobody ever listened to Martin. He was written off as a pest, a burden, an undesirable fixture by those around him. He was sent to his room without supper. He missed the important things. He wished he was strong and brave like Merricat, wished he had the initiative to do what needed to be done, but he was never quite sure what that would mean for him. He certainly wasn't going to poison anybody. He just wanted to believe that he could, if it came to that.

Martin had always thought, quietly, that his life might have been easier if he'd had a sister. Or money. Or a cat. Not that he envied Merricat's life, but... he did, a bit. There were those core differences that made Martin feel bitter and misunderstood at times, but more often than not, Mary Katherine was a comfort to him, the closest thing he had to a friend. So he turned to her when he was lost and confused.

Merricat had magic, and Martin kept up that tradition. He couldn't afford to bury things like she did, he had no land, but he had words. He thought it might be cheating if he chose words that didn't exist in English, and cheating was a jinx, would bring bad luck no matter what. So he followed Merricat's steps like a recipe, came up with a few words and told himself that no change would come so long as they remained unspoken.

Nobody spoke his magic words before his father left, but that didn't dissuade him from believing in the power of the words. He thought he must have just not heard when the words were spoken, he must have simply missed it. He had felt the change coming, anyway, had felt it all the way to his bones before it had happened, and he had nobody to warn, nobody to reassure him before, nobody to comfort him after.

He came up with new magic words on that rainy day, convinced that the ones he had were stale, searching for something to cling to in all the uncertainty. Alone in his room, he thought of words that he was sure the moving men would be unlikely to ever say – he didn’t even know the men, but he knew words, and he knew that if those men specifically said his magic words while they were in his home, the results would be catastrophic. 

By the time Martin finally ventured to the kitchen to get something to eat, his anxiety and his instinct to self-isolate overridden by his growling stomach and curiosity. He went to the bathroom first and brushed his teeth, dressed himself in the kind of clothing he'd want to be wearing if he had to meet new people. His mum had always emphasized the importance of appearances. He didn't want to embarrass her.

Nobody noticed him as he grabbed a banana and a box of cheese crackers, prepared to retreat to his room again as quickly as possible. It would have been easy to get away with – not that he was doing anything wrong, but he always _felt_ like he was doing something wrong. It would have been so easy to slip away, back into solitude and safety, away from these strangers and their unpredictability and whatever criticism his mother had for him.

It would have been easy, and yet he didn't do that. He hung around the study like a lingering odor, a shadow in the doorway watching the men carry boxes out. They didn't pay him any mind as he made himself small and kept himself quiet. That was what Martin did best. He could be invisible when it suited him, just as he often was when it didn't. He stood there watching them for a long time, listening to them joking amongst each other and coordinating their efforts. The box carrying wasn't particularly interesting to watch, but Martin was fascinated, mesmerized by it, trying to figure out a pattern or an answer or a solution.

What was he trying to solve? He didn't know. He only knew that his mum was here, and his dad was not, and something – everything – about the whole situation was wrong. His mum was telling the men what to do, not in the way she spoke to Martin, but politely, professionally. There wasn't much he could have done, even if he had known what he wanted, which he didn't. He didn't know what was wrong or how he could fix it. But he knew his home was slowly, steadily getting emptier and emptier. He knew that his mum had been crying every day for the past few months.

It was hours before Martin moved from his position of passive observation, and then it was only because the men had started emptying the bookshelves, and it felt like something being physically torn from his body. They weren't his books, he'd never read most of them, but they were a pillar of his home, and here they were being packed up in boxes as if they meant nothing, as if they didn't belong there, as if he had no right to want to keep them around. They were his father's. 

He thought of Merricat and Constance keeping their parents' belongings in order for years after they were gone, refusing to let outsiders touch or move their mother's china or their father's study. He wished his mum had the same mindset. He wished he had the capacity to act out, to make a mess, to make a fuss about his way of life crumbling around him.

Instead, he watched on in horror for far too long before he was able to catch a single moment when the room was unoccupied and unsupervised, the men all gone to load some boxes into their truck, his mum having excused herself to the kitchen to make tea, leaving the sparsely populated shelves wide open for Martin's perusal.

There was a single book on a low shelf, one of only a handful that Martin could reach. It was small, a hardcover bound in dark green cloth with no dust jacket, faded gold lettering embossed on the spine and the cover. Martin took it, shoved it under his jumper and returned to his bedroom to squirrel it away like contraband. It had been his father's, just like all the other books, and Martin didn't understand why he had left them behind – Martin didn't understand why he had left _at all_ – and he didn't understand why everything was being taken away now. He wanted to keep something, anything, as a memento, and a book would do as well as anything else.

If it wasn't interesting, he told himself, he could figure out some magic with it. Merricat had taken one of her father's old books and nailed it to a tree for protection. Martin couldn't do that, no nails and no trees, but he could get away with tucking it between the shoe rack and the wall by the door, making a sort of barrier into their home. As it turned out, though, that was unnecessary, because the contents of the book were riveting.

He read straight through the evening, missed the moving men leaving, missed tea. Not that his mum had cooked anything, not that she ever did, but Martin would normally have had something, a microwave dinner or an assortment of snacks scavenged from the cupboard. Food was far from his mind, taking a backseat to his insatiable desire to know this book. He couldn't have said why, but he needed it, needed to internalize it and make it a part of him, needed to memorize it and keep it close to his heart.

It was a slim volume of Sanskrit poetry, translated of course, with his father's name scrawled on the inside of the front cover. It was gorgeous language, vivid imagery and evocative voice, from an author Martin had never heard of, but he fell in love instantly. Martin didn't read voraciously, not like some of the kids at school who devoured books at all hours of the day, but he had his favorites on a neat little shelf above his bed, and this new one fit perfectly alongside them.

He took a pen, though it was still somewhat sacrilege to his child's mind to write in a book, and poised it ceremoniously below his father's name. He held it there for a long time, worrying about what to write, about his own indecision, about his pen running dry, about his mum finding out he kept the book, about her looking inside and seeing his name there – a name he chose for himself, forsaking her and her wishes once again, just another knife in her back.

He worried about that a lot – constantly, in fact – enough that he couldn't bring himself to write his name the way he would have preferred. Eventually, he settled on M.K. Blackwood, printed small and neat as he could manage, right underneath his dad's pointed script.

It could be explained, he told himself, without having to address the issue that would really upset her. If she found it, and if she asked, he had the ready-made answer right on the very same shelf: she was aware of and understood his attachment to Mary Katherine and her story. She could sympathize with a bit of projection far easier than she could comprehend her only child entirely renouncing the way she had raised him.

That was how she would see it, he was sure. At nine years old, Martin Blackwood was enough himself to be sure that he was a boy, and equally sure that he was Martin, and he was enough his mother's child to know that she wasn't ready for any of that yet. So he decided to wait, until the sting of his father leaving had scabbed over, until he was no longer beholden to his mother for his survival, until he was even more sure.

Truth be told, he didn't really know what he was waiting for, but he knew he had to wait. Besides, the longer he kept it to himself, the more time he had to figure out a middle name to go with Martin. He liked the K, always came back to it when brainstorming names, knew he definitely wanted to keep it as an homage to the kindred spirit in his favorite story, but he could never figure out what it stood for in his name.

He cherished his father’s book, treasured it and kept it safe and read through it over and over and over through his adolescence. He housed it on the shelf above his bed with his battered copy of _We Have Always Lived in the Castle,_ kept them together and kept them close. Adding that little book to his tiny collection was the start of Martin's life, in a lot of ways: the beginning of his love affair with poetry, the only connection he still held to his father, the text that shaped his outlook on life, the source of more than one name change, the first of which came to him on that rainy afternoon but didn't stick around for very long.

That night in his bedroom with his dad's book in his hands, he called himself M.K. Blackwood for the first time and it felt right. Then and there, he named himself after his father – sentimental, yes, but also convenient – and he was Martin Kieran Blackwood, and he was the only person who knew it, and that was alright. Even then, he was fairly certain it would only be temporary, that he would change it before it ever became the kind of thing he would have to tell his mum about and make it a whole issue.

In the weeks after the strange men took away all the memories of his dad, Martin had apricot jam on his toast in the mornings. He savored the irony like a delicacy, thinking about how he had been so excited about the apricot jam, how he had never dreamed a change would come before the jar was finished. His apricot jam was not like Merricat’s, though, because nobody had made this jam for him; his dad had bought it, and now his dad was gone. Gone off to brighter and better things, supposedly. Nobody had stolen him or made him go away, he simply didn't care that Martin had to keep living and keep eating the jam that he had bought. 

If Martin had had someone in his life like Constance, maybe his sense of self wouldn't have been quite so entangled with his understanding of those two books, the one that he had loved as long as he could remember, the other that he found on that Sunday afternoon. Maybe his formative ages wouldn't have been colored so deeply by his attachment to figurative language and fictional characters. But he had nobody – no sister, no friends, no support – nobody but the echo of his father's taste in poetry and a young girl in a book. He learned how to shape words like that, and he learned how to do magic in his everyday life, and he learned how to protect himself from being hurt. 

He was never too good at that last bit, but he learned it, in theory.


	2. all the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw this chapter contains very brief mention of martin being afraid that jon will react badly to him coming out. jon does not react badly bc he is a good man but also bc spoiler alert he is also trans.

_ii. on the moon we have everything. lettuce, and pumpkin pie and amanita phalloides. we have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. all the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts._

* * *

When he was seventeen years old, desperately searching for jobs to keep himself and his mum afloat, Martin Blackwood came to the conclusion that he despised his father, genuinely and deeply. It was a decision hard won from years of training himself to stop missing him, to stop wishing that his mum had left and his dad had stayed. His mum wasn't perfect by a long shot, but she was there, at least. It didn't occur to teenage Martin that he could hate both of his parents, so learning to hate his father required learning to appreciate what little his mother did for him. 

Somewhere around the time that he dropped out of school, Martin dropped his father's name as his middle name. He was iffy about the surname, wanting to sever all possible ties with the man who abandoned him, but, well. It was still his mum's surname, and more importantly, it was Merricat's, so he kept it. But he found himself once again with a middle initial that stood for nothing.

He kept it that way for a few years, far too concerned with more pressing matters to worry about finding himself or coming to terms with his identity. It wasn't until he had a stable job, and he'd been single for a while, and he was talking to a therapist, that he even thought about it again. His therapist suggested it, actually, told him that it might be a good way to get to know himself, free from the constraints of his parents and what he thought he should be. 

Martin floated an idea, and Gemma smiled gently and said it sounded nice, and he immediately started panicking. Asked her a thousand questions about what if he was only clinging to it as a way to hold onto his dad while convincing himself he wasn't, what if he was vainly trying to claim access to a culture that he had very little experience in, what if he was acting on a frivolous whim and he changed his mind in a week?

And Gemma calmly told him that that was pretty healthy, actually. That moving away from his attachment to a fantasy of a memory was a multi-step process that he would have to take slowly, and that naming himself after his father's book of poetry was a reasonable way to start that journey. That the culture was something he deserved to explore as a part of his identity, whether that meant going through the connection provided by his father or simply learning about it while trying to forget his father. That he was allowed to change his mind, that he was encourage to change his mind as he learned more about himself and became more comfortable in his skin.

It took some more convincing, but he came around to it eventually, when Gemma looked him in the eye and said "Martin, do you _like_ the name? That's all that matters."

And he told her that he did like the name, and he wanted it, and she told him that that was a good enough reason to use it. Martin sighed and told her he wasn't about to start putting it on paperwork or anything, but it was a warm little secret in his chest, something that made him happy when he was stressed about money or his mother or his (still somewhat new) job.

Getting hired at the Magnus Institute was nothing short of a miracle, in Martin's eyes. It was riding on a horrific lie that could get him fired if anyone ever found out, but other than that, it was a dream come true. It paid far more than he could have hoped for, not an outrageous amount but well enough to support his mum, and it was quiet, and he got to spend a lot of time alone in the library. It was nice.

Nevertheless, Martin liked working in the archives a lot better than the library, he was quickly finding. It was difficult work, and he had a lot of anxiety about – well, everything. His lack of qualifications, his lack of social skills, his job security, his supervisor's open disdain for him on a personal and professional level, all of it kept him up nights and made his days at work long and harrowing.

But it was worth it. He liked it.

Tim and Sasha, at least, made it more than bearable. They were good friends, understanding and funny and interesting, the perfect buffer between him and Jon, whose vocal hatred of him was the biggest burden on his self esteem and hindrance to his work.

And yet, somehow even Jon was rather a positive presence in his life than anything else. It was early on in their working relationship when Martin discovered that Jon was, for all his cynicism and nagging and irritability, still fairly easy to talk to in a more relaxed setting. He wasn't nice, by most metrics, but he was soft spoken and engaged and almost charming, when he tried. He never pretended to be Martin's biggest fan, but he didn't display quite the same level of contempt when he wasn't concerned with Martin screwing up on the job.

There was one place in particular where Jon really went above and beyond, which was sort of baffling the first few times it came up, but quickly became potent fuel for Martin's little crush on him. He was brilliant, lovely even, in the exact area that Martin had expected him to be vicious and insensitive. Martin had spent months – not necessarily keeping anything from him, but very deliberately not giving Jon any more information than he needed about his gender or sexuality. Jon didn't fit the profile of the type of person who usually gave Martin a hard time over things like that, but he liked to give Martin a hard time over a lot of different things, and Martin was reluctant to give him more ammunition.

So they had known each other for a while when it came out accidentally over drinks, on one of the rare Friday evenings when Tim and Sasha managed to convince Jon to join them, and Martin was hardly even tipsy but it was enough to make him say things he normally would never have said to Jon's face. He wasn't entirely sure how they got to the point in the evening where he was sharing things about himself, but there they were, and Tim made a laughing reference to his testosterone shots, nudged Martin in the ribs in a show of camaraderie.

Martin had to give a nervous little laugh and glance furtively at Jon, suddenly horrified and frozen in fear of what he might say, what he might think. Jon just shook his head, smiled something almost fond in Tim's direction. Martin didn't have the presence of mind to interpret that gesture any further than to comprehend that he didn't have to freak out about it at that precise moment. In any case, it was obvious that his not-quite-secret was out, and it was almost a relief, knowing that he didn't have to worry about hiding it anymore.

It was about an hour and several drinks later when Martin made some self-deprecating joke and Sasha smacked him on the arm, trying to hide her laughter. "Martin Jeremiah Blackwood," she chided, putting on her disappointed face, all tight frown and furrowed brow.

"That's not my name," Martin told her with a bemused look.

"No, I know," she replied breezily, "it's Tim's. I just like the way it sounds. It kind of goes with any name."

Martin and Tim laughed at that together, shaking their heads at Sasha's antics, but Jon got very quiet. Nobody noticed for a long moment, until the laughter died down and they saw him sitting there in contemplative silence, his lips pursed in thought. Before one of them could say anything about his expression, he spoke, his voice vague and curious.

"What _is_ your middle name, Martin?"

Martin froze again, panic shooting through him at the mere fact of Jon speaking directly to him, not to mention the nature of the conversation. Jon didn't usually ask him questions, and he certainly didn't show an active interest in Martin's life, and Martin was momentarily thrown, unsure how to answer, or if he should answer, or if he could answer, were he to try.

When he thought about it in earnest, though, Martin realized that he did have the perfect answer. He hadn't told anybody his middle name since he had last changed it, and he was quite proud of it, and he was used to it enough that he had been eager to share it for a while. He wanted to get it out in the open, to test the waters, to see what others thought of the name that made him feel so good about himself in such complex ways, and he was never going to get a better opportunity than this moment.

"Kālidāsa," he said plainly, the word feeling significant on his tongue. It hung in the air for a second after the fact, heavy and loud.

The others looked at him, attempting to suss out if he was serious, and he was. He held firm, gave a small, decisive nod of his head to drive it home, waited for someone else to comment.

"That's really nice," Sasha said.

"I like it," Tim added, "it rolls off the tongue."

Jon nodded his agreement, offered Martin a small, shy smile. "Mine's Amos," he mumbled, almost bashfully. "Just. If you were curious."

Martin grinned at that, wide and bright, and Tim and Sasha hummed little noises of appreciation. Jon acknowledged them, his face flushed dark, and then straightened his back and looked around the table, craned his neck to catch sight of the opposite wall of the pub. "If you'll excuse me," he muttered, sliding out of his seat and jerking his head in the direction of the restrooms. "I'll be right back."

The memory of Jon's reassuring smile and his reciprocal vulnerability made it easy enough for Martin to let him go, to continue the conversation without spiraling into a panic about the whole thing. Sasha started talking to him again as Jon walked away, and Martin was miraculously able to actually pay attention to her question instead of getting caught up in his head about why Jon had left and whether he had said something to scare him off.

"I really like that name," she said, a bit redundantly but Martin appreciated the repeated validation. "Is there a story behind it?"

"Yeah, it's, erm." Martin hesitated, stammering and fidgeting with his fingers. "It's after – he was a – a poet? A really famous poet from India, from like the fifth century or something. I had this book – it was my dad's – it's silly, I know, but I just really liked it."

He stuttered through his vague explanation, restraining himself from dumping a history lesson on his unsuspecting friends, not wanting to let on that he actually knew pretty much everything on the subject, that his mind had cared about little else for a while when he was younger – he didn't need to give them any other reasons to think he was weird. _I liked fairy tales and books of history,_ he thought to himself, momentarily reassured by the thought of Merricat and her library books. 

Tim smiled, clinked his glass against Martin's bottle of cider. "That's not silly," he assured him, and Sasha hummed an affirmative to back him up. "It's sweet. I think it's really cute, how you like poetry so much, and how you're all sentimental, it's adorable."

Rolling her eyes, Sasha snorted and breathed out a short sigh. "Can't take you anywhere," she huffed fondly. "One drink in and you start flirting with anything that moves."

"What?" Tim clasped a hand to his chest in mock scandal. "You can't tell me it's not cute. You can't tell me he isn't cute."

"Of course it is," said Sasha placatingly, then, turning back to Martin: "What's this guy's poetry like? Any good?"

Martin's eyes went a bit fuzzy as he stared off into the distance and murmured softly, lines falling from his lips as easily as his own name. "Look to this day: for it is life, the very life of life; in its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence. The bliss of growth, the glory of action, the splendor of achievement are but experiences of time. For yesterday is but a dream, and tomorrow is only a vision; and today well-lived, makes yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well therefore to this day; such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn."

He shook out of his trance-like state, blinking back the misty beginnings of tears, and saw Tim and Sasha both smiling at him, like he'd done something worth being proud of, and that almost made him cry in earnest. He chose to blame it on the alcohol, though he knew on some level it was just the way he was.

"That's really beautiful," Sasha said simply. She and Tim both knew better than to make any comments that could be mistaken for making fun, especially when Martin had been drinking, doubly so when he was talking about something to do with his father. Sasha straightened her back, chirped, "My middle name is Josephine, after my mum's aunt," and that was the subject easily changed, and they moved on as normal as anything.

By the time Jon came back from the restroom, they were on an entirely different topic of conversation, and he slid into the booth and joined in seamlessly. He gave Martin another little smile when he sat down, and Martin smiled back at him, too tipsy and giddy to be embarrassed at the way his teeth were on display. He was almost always self conscious about everything when Jon was involved, but not tonight. Tonight, he laughed and talked and drank and let himself exist, and Jon did it with him, and Martin felt more sure of himself than he had in years.

It took about a month after that night before Martin decided he hated the name Kālidāsa and hated himself for choosing it. It was stupid and pretentious – not in general, but for him specifically, one of those things that his mind told him was only not okay when it was him. Everyone already thought he was trying too hard all the time, and the last thing he needed was to go and make that worse. Plus, he had done his research and everything and he understood his father's culture, but it wasn't _his_ culture, not really, and it felt wrong to use it without a real connection to it.

He dropped the name, and Gemma told him it was okay, and that made him feel okay. She said some psychology words about how using that name for a while had helped him work through some of his trauma and practice letting himself be who he wanted to be, but Martin was pretty sure it just helped him hate himself even more. He cried in her office, afraid that he would never find a name that felt like him, and she comforted him and reminded him about the journey and all that.

"The right name will come to you when it comes," she soothed with a hand on his shoulder. He left her office that afternoon as Martin Just-K Blackwood again, stubbornly pretending to be okay with that. At least he had plenty of practice in pretending to be okay.


	3. and on the moon we will eat rose petals

_ iii. today my winged horse is coming and i am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon we will eat rose petals. _

* * *

Martin was sitting in the break room when it came to him, not like a lightbulb over his head, not like a eureka moment, but just like a regular, everyday idea. He was stirring his tea, thinking idly about how Jon might be doing, and a snippet floated across his mind like a butterfly:

_ One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love, _

_ Unmask’d, and being seen—without a blot! _

_ O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine! _

It caught him off guard, the fierce wave of emotion that came with it, when he hadn't even been...  _ pining, _ the way he often did. He had just been  _ thinking, _ and now here was all of this dropped in his lap, and he was in no state to go down that road, so he allowed the train of thought to detour down the path of least resistance, and that was how he started thinking about Keats – and then he realized.

He paused, cocked his head to the side, looked at Tim where he sat across the table. "I need a new middle name," he stated, somewhat out of nowhere, at least from Tim's perspective. "I know it's embarrassing, but is it –  _ too  _ embarrassing, to name myself after John Keats?"

"No," Tim said vaguely with a shake of his head, "I don’t think so. Not so different from the last one, is it?"

"I don't know." Martin took a sip of his tea, tentative and uncertain, narrowing his eyes. "It feels different. It feels... well, it feels right, but it feels like it  _ should _ feel wrong? Like I should be ashamed of it, but I don't know if I am."

"It  _ is  _ just a regular name," Tim pointed out. "Like, if you named yourself Lucas, nobody would think you're this crazy Star Wars fan. It's a name."

"It’s pretty much exclusively a surname, but still, I suppose that's true," Martin mused, nodding quietly to himself. "It's just... I don't know, I like it, I really do, but it feels like something I should be embarrassed about, you know? Like I'm some pretentious windbag, like I think I'm on his level or something."

"Nobody would think that. It’s totally reasonable to name yourself as an homage to a poet you look up to. You really like him, yeah?" Tim asked him, sitting up straighter and giving him an earnest look. "One of your favorites, you told me.”

Martin nodded his head slowly, once, his brow wrinkled as he continued staring at a vague, distant point, as if squinting through the fog to see something that wasn’t there. He thought about Gemma all those years ago, helping him through this same process with a different name. He wasn’t sure what he found more ludicrous, the idea that changing his name was as simple as picking one that he liked, or the fact that he consistently needed other people to remind him that he was allowed to do just that. 

He thought about Mary Katherine Blackwood, who begged neither permission nor forgiveness for her quirks, her eccentricities, her reaching out and grabbing what she desired. She would never be this anxious over something so silly. She had ways to figure things like this out, she had rules for herself, and she may have a nervous breakdown if anyone  _ else  _ questioned her decisions, but she had methods to mitigate that damage as well. She was magic. 

John Keats was magic, too, in his own way. Martin wasn’t about to proclaim that he was the greatest poet of all time, wasn’t about to stake his own respectability on the credible reputation of any Romantic dandy, but… “Yeah, he’s – top ten, for sure,” he said, because he also wasn’t about to lie to Tim or downplay his admiration. “Definitely my favorite poet whose name starts with the right letter.”

His tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth, Tim thought for a moment before venturing a response. “And it needs to be that letter because of a book character, right?” He winced immediately at his own question, scrambling to remedy it before Martin could respond. “I didn’t mean it to sound like that, it’s just – I don’t know, it seems like the literary theme is a big one with you, and I like it. I think it’s very respectable and also very cool, and if you’re looking at new middle names, I don’t think you need to be worried that keeping with that theme is somehow wrong. It’s consistent.”

“Yeah,” Martin muttered, “I guess so.”

“Just so you know,” Tim piped up, his tone abruptly light and matter-of-fact, “I’m not only saying it’s fine because I don’t want to hurt your feelings. If you were thinking of naming yourself after Kerouac, I’d laugh you into the street.”

With a little huff of a laugh, more relief than mirth, Martin leaned back in his seat. “I’d expect nothing less,” he replied.

“That’s what friends are for,” Tim shot back with a bright grin. “I say go for it, really. Nobody else is going to think about it as much as you’re thinking about it, and what they do think about it won’t be anything like what you’re worried they’ll think about it."

Giving him a soft smile, Martin nodded his head again, fingering the handle of his mug in a nervous sort of motion. "Thanks, Tim. You know how I am, just all the time," he babbled meaninglessly, "and with this stuff, it's just – difficult, I guess? To just let myself have my own thoughts without getting myself worked up about it. Can’t ever just  _ do  _ anything, it's got to be a whole big deal, hasn't it?"

Tim raised his eyebrows, his wide brown eyes brimming with some mixture of sympathy and warmth. "With you? Always," he answered, softening the blow with a cheeky grin. "But that's why we love you, isn't it?"

"Who's this  _ we?" _ Martin asked, snide and sincere at once. "Just you, last I checked."

"That's not true," Tim chided, then snapped his mouth shut with an audible click of his teeth. He narrowed his eyes and clenched his jaw, looking intently at the wall past Martin's shoulder.

Martin recognized that expression. It had become a frequent occurrence during their conversations of late. So, despite the fact that it felt out of the blue and out of place, he was fairly confident in his assessment of it, and it wasn’t a stretch at all for him to ask, "You're trying not to mention him, aren't you?"

Tim snorted derisively, averted his gaze even more pointedly. "Of course I am," he muttered. "We're having such a nice conversation, why would I ruin it?"

Exasperated and exhausted, all Martin could think to say was, "You know you're being ridiculous."

"Don't care," Tim retorted with an angry shrug.

Martin paused, thinking about Charles Blackwood. Thinking about intrusions and disruptions in a life that, though far from perfect, was still as good as it could have been under the circumstances. Jon wasn’t an intrusion, and Martin knew it, and Tim knew it, but there was no way to get into that without really getting  _ into  _ it, and Martin didn’t want to do that, not right now. He was quiet with these thoughts for a long time, unsure what else he could really say, until something occurred to him. He leveled Tim with a somber look, pursed his lips and took a deep inhale, and mumbled under his breath: "He doesn't, you know."

That made Tim snap his eyes up to Martin's face, harsh and quick, leveling him with a shrewd look. "Doesn't what?"

Rolling his eyes, Martin answered with a simple echo of, "You  _ know." _

It looked as if Tim was having a difficult time forcing himself to even pursue the argument, like he would have preferred to simply let Martin believe what he wanted to believe, but he gritted his teeth and persisted. "Yeah, he does. He loves you maybe just as much as I do. Don't make me convince you."

"Fine," Martin shrugged, pursing his lips as if he'd been proven right. "Don't convince me, because it's not true."

Tim took a deep breath, running his hand through his hair to push it out of his eyes. "He'd be gone, if not for you," he said, thoughtful and distant and far less angry than Martin had heard him in weeks. "He's off the deep end and you're the only thing keeping him afloat."

Scoffing in disbelief, Martin folded his arms across his chest. "We don't even  _ talk,” _ he insisted, irritation creeping in at the edges of his voice. “He doesn't even  _ like  _ me."

"He doesn't  _ act  _ like it,” Tim corrected him immediately, “because he's a fucking dickhead, but – I know him, alright? He cares about you. He does."

Martin set his jaw, looked down at the floor and then back up at Tim’s face. He mulled over his thoughts for a long, quiet moment before deciding that he couldn’t really continue arguing, so he tried a different tactic. "He cares about you, too. You should give him a chance."

A loud huff of breath escaped Tim, halfway between a laugh and a grunt. "He's had a lot of chances, Martin,” he muttered bitterly. “I don't want to talk about it."

"Right,” Martin said under his breath, shaking his head. “Sorry."

"Try talking to  _ him _ about it, maybe,” Tim offered. His voice was softer, as was his face – an olive branch, a consolation prize, an apology. A piece of genuine advice to make up for being a terror.

Martin smiled at him, shook his head again, more fond than annoyed this time. "Tim, I can't do that. Don't be silly."

Tim shrugged unenthusiastically. "Alright, don't. Just – whatever. I can’t be the one reassuring you about him, not with the way things are between us these days. You won’t believe it coming from me, no matter how much I say it." He released a deep sigh, rubbed his eyes aggressively for a moment before continuing, "It's a nice name, anyway. He'll like it."

Confused, Martin frowned deeply and furrowed his brow. "It's not for him,” he asserted, rather more firmly than he actually felt it. Everything he did was a little bit for Jon, if he was being honest with himself, which he usually was not.

Rather than responding to that directly – thankfully, Martin thought, as he wasn’t really in the mood to be teased about his crush at the moment – Tim mused thoughtfully, "Does he even know you got rid of the last one?"

Martin straightened his back, eyes widening slightly as he thought about it and realized the answer: he hadn’t talked to Jon about it since that night at the bar, which felt like a lifetime ago. "Erm... no, I don't think so."

Tim nodded, pressing his lips together to suppress a smile, and possibly to restrain an insensitive comment, only opening his mouth again when he’d had the chance to think through his words. "And how does that make you feel?"

"Shut up," Martin snapped at him, impulsively, in spite of the tone of Tim’s voice and the look on his face openly advertising that he was speaking in good faith, earnest and kind, if a bit harsh in his application of the truth. "It's embarrassing. I'm  _ embarrassed _ about it.”

“Just embarrassed?” Tim prodded.

“It feels wrong,” Martin continued, uncomfortable under the pressure of Tim’s curious gaze. “Like – like he has this image of who I am and it’s not me at all, it’s some out-of-date version of me, and I don’t know how to correct it because I don’t know how to talk to him about anything. It feels  _ weird, _ are you happy now?"

"No, of course not. I don't enjoy seeing you upset," Tim soothed, reaching out to gently stroke Martin's hand. "I just think you should talk to him. Tell him you picked a new name, tell him what it means, tell him you're in love with him –"

"Whoa, Tim," Martin interrupted in a high, squeaky voice. "That's a hell of a leap to make."

Tim shrugged again, nonchalant, as if he had said nothing out of the ordinary, and then continued in the same manner. "Maybe being with you would make him less insufferable."

Martin heaved a long, exasperated sigh. "Shut  _ up, _ Tim."

"Recite a poem for him."

"That's a laugh."

_ "My boss's eyes are nothing like the sun; coral is far more red than his lips red; if snow be white, why then his breasts are dun; if hair be wires, black wires grow on his head." _

Clapping a hand over Tim's mouth, Martin leaned in close to his face, speaking low and slow, like Tim had crossed a serious line, but with a glint in his eye that said he was playing it up. "His hair is amazing," he hissed, "you know it is. And I'm leaving now."

Rather than turning to go, Martin narrowed his eyes and waited for Tim's answer. The reply was muffled by Martin's hand still clamped over his mouth, so Tim licked his palm, making him pull away with a noise of disgust. Tim looked up at Martin wiping his hand on his shirt, grinned wide and bright, and repeated, "Tell him I said hey."

Seething, Martin shook his head. "I will not," he stated simply, then turned on his heel and left. 

When he saw Jon that afternoon, Martin was a stammering mess, and he nearly blurted out a thousand different things about his name, about his crush, about Tim, but he managed to keep from embarrassing himself too badly. By the end of their short conversation about some statement or another, Jon looked more confused than disdainful, and Martin didn't have to speak to him again for a few days, by which time he'd shaken off the effects of Tim's psychoanalysis.

Martin Keats Blackwood was the same person as before, and he forced himself to ignore the voice in his head telling him he wasn't. He was the same person as before, and that was a good person, a kind person, a person worthy of love and respect and all the other things that he'd been told. Tim had been right. Gemma had been right. Jon had been wrong, a thousand times, and Martin Keats Blackwood would prove it to him.


	4. we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw this one is. depressing. it takes place in the months between s3 and s4, so there is a lot of talk about martin's relationship with his mother and his coping with her death and losing tim and jon. much focus on death and memory and mourning. and it is just a small canon-compliant snapshot, so you know and i know that jon will wake up, but martin does not know that, and so the scope of this chapter is overall kind of gloomy.

_iv. on the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. on the moon we had gold spoons._

* * *

Martin had always been an absolutist, a black-and-white thinker, and he nurtured deep within himself a sense of righteous anger at certain injustices. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, he didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t how things were meant to go. It was a hard mindset to hold onto when nothing _ever_ went the way it was meant to go. He spent an awful lot of energy reconciling his worldview with, well, the reality of the world.

There wasn't much time for pondering on the unfairness of the world these days, and everyone who would listen to him or care about his feelings was gone. Basira and Melanie were always around, but they wouldn't entertain his moping. 

He was past moping, these days. A better word might be despondent, or catatonic. He really didn't do much of anything, except when he had to hide during an attack on the Institute or when he got leave to visit his mum.

Well. He _had_ been getting leave to visit his mum quite often, taking a Friday or a Monday off once or twice a month so he could use the three-day weekend to care for her, but that… that was all over, now. That was no longer a concern.

And it should have been a relief, or it should have been devastating, but he just felt nothing. Numb. Drifting. Absolutely lost. 

Tim was dead. Jon was – as good as dead, everyone kept telling him. His mum was dead. Elias was gone, and he may have been evil, but he was still a pillar of Martin's life that was knocked down, and if Martin lost any more fucking pillars at this point, he thought he might just drop dead himself. He wondered if it might be different if he had someone to depend upon, like Merricat did, if he had a Constance to be his constant and his reason to keep going, but it wasn't really worth dwelling on that. He _didn't_ have anybody, and that was something he had to admit to himself.

He knew he should go to Lukas. He knew that was the smart choice, but it didn't feel right. It didn't feel _fair._ It felt like giving up, and Martin was never one to give up, even when all hope was lost, which as it happened was a rather frequent occurrence in his life. He was a font of hope, though, and he intended to continue hoping until there was no possible way to do so.

For a little while, he just hid away from the world and thought a lot. Introspection was Martin’s forte, and he had all the time in the world for it these days, what with all his worldly cares ripped from his life without care. He thought about himself, and he thought about Merricat, and even she was not much solace to him, but she was there for him, and that was what mattered. He imagined huddling with a loved one under cover and hoping the villagers wouldn’t find them, imagined having someone to be with him here at rock bottom, and that certainly didn’t make anything better.

He thought about his name, too. It was stupid, he told himself, such a frivolous thing to be thinking about at such a time, but he couldn’t just think about all the horrible things in the world during his every waking moment, he would never survive that. So he thought about silly things, things like poetry and names and daydreams about the future.

His mother’s name had been Iris. Iris Blackwood. She had kept his father’s surname after he left, kept it until her dying day, because her hatred for him could never outweigh her hatred for _her_ father. She had told Martin this, in her later days, when she was unsure who he was – she would never confide in him like that when he was just her son. When she recognized him, she only told him secrets about how useless he was and how difficult he had made her life.

Martin wasn’t in denial, he knew exactly who his mother had been and exactly how she had felt about him, had known even before Elias had told him, it would have been impossible not to. But now. Well. They hadn’t always gotten on perfectly, to say the least, but he did love her. She was his mother, and family was – not unconditional, not immutable, but it was all he had had, at one point in his life, and now that she was gone, he couldn’t very well go on hating her. 

He was alone. Utterly alone in the world, and just because his mother wasn’t loving or compassionate or maternal in any way didn’t mean that he had to let his every memory of her be tainted. And he was getting quite sick of his middle name, and he was quite in need of an identity check, after all the official paperwork and everything with his mother’s will, he just wanted to feel like Martin again.

He could have said that he did it to honor her, to bless her memory, if anyone had cared enough to ask, but of course, they did not, and Martin was quite past lying to himself by this point. He did it for himself, to make himself feel better, to make himself believe that he still had a human connection in the world. And despite their rocky relationship, his mother had given him his faith, which had so often been a source of comfort and community when he had none, and he would always be thankful for that. He would always cherish that.

If the world were normal, if his life were normal, Martin could have sought comfort in a temple, could have mourned his mum and Tim and Jon properly, surrounded by people who cared. As it was, he could only do it himself, and the only tools he had at his disposal were his name and his words. Those meant something.

Iris. It was Greek, meaning rainbow. Martin had always been interested in name meanings and word origins, seeing as he was a poet with an unstable sense of identity. He had also always been interested in meaning in general – wanting everything to have its place, to mean something in his story. So the way it all fell in place for him seemed like it made too much sense to ignore.

The Hebrew word for rainbow – well, the English transliteration of the Hebrew word for rainbow, anyway – dropped into his lap when he was sitting under his desk in the archives. He wasn’t hiding from a monster, not this time; he was only hiding from his thoughts and his coworkers, reading poetry on his phone, writing poetry in his notes app, and searching for something, anything to make his life make just a little bit of sense. And it came to him.

He hadn’t known, before, hadn’t ever seen the word before, at least not that he could remember, until that day. He looked up his mother’s name, just to look at it again, and then decided on a whim to click the link on the word rainbow. Which brought him to a page full of names with the same meaning from a hundred different languages, and it made him feel a little bit less cold inside, to know that people everywhere were so fond of those colors in the sky that they continued to name their children after a trick of the light.

Merricat would have liked that, Martin thought. She liked meaning, too. She was probably the source of Martin’s fixation on the power that words held, the magic that could be done with them. Merricat would never have named herself after her dead parents, but then again, Merricat had her name and her sense of self and rarely questioned it, so Martin allowed himself some deviations from her ways of thinking.

So, at the end of the day, he felt pretty confident about his new name. It was a beautiful, meaningful dedication to his mum, to their shared faith, to what little good he could salvage of their relationship. He would have a long time to think on it before it would become something that he would have to speak aloud to another human being, if ever. If he didn’t, for instance, die in the meantime.

He thought maybe going to visit Jon would – well, he wasn’t sure what he thought it would do. He told Jon. He said the words aloud, knowing Jon couldn’t hear him, couldn’t understand him, but it was good to hear it in his own voice and know that he was saying it to someone, not just talking to himself as he so often did.

“I changed my middle name,” he murmured wetly, holding Jon’s hand, gripping it tighter when he realized how limp it was in his grasp. “Twice, actually, since the last time you asked. The… the only time you asked.”

He laughed at that, quietly to himself, though there was nothing funny about it. Nothing funny at all. He laughed, and it came out of his mouth sounding cracked and broken and so, so sad, and that made him laugh again at how fitting it was that he couldn’t even laugh without the sadness creeping in. And then he was crying, properly crying with fat, hot tears streaming down his cheeks as he held onto Jon’s hand as if his life depended on it.

“Sorry,” he said through his tears, on instinct, before realizing how ridiculous it was to apologize essentially to himself for crying. How ridiculous it was that he was here at all, talking to Jon like he could actually hear him. He used his free hand to swipe at his cheeks, the sleeve of his sweater quickly growing damp, and sniffled a few times to try and get it under control. 

“Er,” he started, his voice shaking, then cleared his throat and tried again: “I always wanted to, you know, thank you. For that. Never got the chance, so I guess I’ll do it now, for all the good that it’ll do me. Thank you, Jon. Thanks for – for caring. I know it was just one offhand question, you probably didn’t even mean anything by it, and – heaven knows you’ve done so much more for me since then, but. It meant a lot to me, back then. It still does.

“I want – I want you to know so many things about me, Jon. And I know telling you right now is as good as not telling you at all, but I might not get another chance. I probably – I most likely won’t get another chance.” Martin stopped, took a deep, shuddering breath. He had gotten himself started, and now he was going to follow through. “I love you, you know. I would like to say I’m in love with you, but that – that’s not right. Not when you’re like this. Maybe, if you… if you come back one day, maybe I’ll tell you then.”

It took a moment for Martin to work up the energy – he didn’t want to say _courage,_ didn’t want to admit to himself that he was _afraid_ to say it out loud when no one would even hear him – to actually tell Jon. “It’s Keshet,” he whispered, like it was some kind of secret, like he was worried that the nobody around him would overhear what he was saying to the nobody in the hospital bed. “Keshet,” he repeated, feeling the shape of it in his mouth. “Martin Keshet Blackwood.”

He sat there staring at Jon’s face for a long time, then, silently searching for any hint of recognition or response, though of course there was none. Jon was too far gone to even look peaceful in his rest. He just looked lost, which was another slap in the face for Martin. He couldn’t even make himself believe that Jon was in a better place, not when he looked so small and tired.

“Anyway,” Martin finally said, his voice weak. “I just wanted to… to tell you that. Because I can’t tell anyone else. There’s no one – there’s no one else left, Jon,” he half-sobbed, letting his head fall into his hands. He let himself cry for a short minute before pulling himself together again.

“I used to do this with my mum,” he confided in Jon’s lifeless body. “When she was in that place, sometimes I would take the train all the way up there and the nurse would tell me they’d had to sedate her, but I would stay and just… talk. When she was in a deep, medicated sleep, that was the only time I really _could_ talk to her.”

Giving Jon’s hand a squeeze, Martin almost heard the kind of dry reply he might have gotten in response to that, if Jon were awake. They had never really gotten close enough for Jon to make _jokes_ about his mother’s situation, but Jon had always been able to make a witty remark go a long way in making Martin feel things. For the longest time, it had been mostly spent on degrading him, but towards the end – in more recent times, Jon had been able to make him laugh, to make him feel comfortable and wanted, and it was nice to imagine him doing that now.

Of course, imagination was all he had. “You’re much easier to talk to than my mum,” he added, worried about hurting Jon’s feelings by comparing the two situations. Still holding onto the hope that Jon was present, that his feelings were there to be hurt. “Equally unresponsive, obviously, but… when my mum was asleep, I told her things I would never say to her face. Everything I’m telling you now, everything I’ve told you for the last few months, I would say it even if you could hear it. I hope you do get to hear it, someday.”

When Martin left Jon’s hospital room that day, nothing was fixed. Nothing was better. Nothing was easier. But he didn’t feel any closer to giving up completely than he had felt the day before, and that was something. He was strong enough to hold on a little bit longer, and if he could keep finding ways to hold on a little bit longer, then a little bit longer would eventually become quite a long time, and if he could hold on for a long time, then maybe something would change.

 _Maybe Jon would wake up,_ was what he did not allow himself to think. There was a point where hope had to become naïveté, and Martin was a lot of things, but he was not naïve. He allowed himself to have some hope for the future, and he allowed himself to dream of the moon, but he knew the difference between the two. He had to know the difference, or he would be utterly delusional. He knew well enough not to think that Jon could come back from this, any more than Tim could come back from what happened to him, but if he stood his ground long enough, maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe the attacks on the Institute would stop. Maybe Peter Lukas would stop trying to recruit him into whatever diabolical plan he was cooking up. Maybe he and Basira and Melanie would figure out a way out of this mess.

Even as Martin told himself he could stay strong, he felt the hairline fracture in his resolve begin to widen, prepared to swallow him whole as soon as he gave it the chance.


	5. please let me be on the moon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this takes place after (and a little bit during) mag164, bc that is what originally inspired me to write this whole fic. obviously we all know they will not live happily ever after but for the sake of this fic, even tho it is canon compliant, i would like you to imagine that they might.

_ v. i am on the moon, i thought, please let me be on the moon. _

* * *

Everything feels too peaceful at the end of the world. Martin thinks he should be more upset about it, all things considered, but for now he's full of determination and righteous fury and love, it doesn't seem like the end of anything so much as the beginning of a journey. It won't last that way, but he's savoring it, happy to be with Jon while he can. They haven’t talked about it yet, because that’s a topic best avoided until they’re staring down the barrel of a gun, but they know it won’t be easy.

_ Perhaps the apocalypse might be persuaded to reverse itself,  _ Martin thinks idly, laughing quietly to himself at the absurdity of it all. There’s an innocence in it, something he always took for hope when he read it as a child, but now just seems like delusion. Disasters are disasters; they happen and they don't unhappen. Then again, they can be lived in, sometimes – if Merricat and Constance could make a life in their burnt husk of a castle, then he can make something here with Jon.

Still, Martin is scared. All the time. How could he not be, when they don’t know anything about where they’re going or what they’ll do once they get there or anything they’ll have to handle on the way? Jon seems fairly confident about a lot of things these days, and it only goes so far in reassuring Martin, until Jon starts insisting that he  _ knows  _ things.

“You’ve been  _ knowing  _ a lot, lately,” Martin tells him, apprehensive. “A lot more than you used to.”

“Yeah,” Jon replies softly, then continues with more conviction, “and it feels more – deliberate. Like I have more control now.”

Martin nods at that, schooling his expression into something understanding, calm, supportive. “Okay,” he says, speaking slow and walking slower. “So, how much can you see? What else do you know?”

Jon’s brow wrinkles in that way that always makes Martin want to kiss it smooth again, and his stride falters as he answers with genuine surprise, “Maybe everything.”

“What do you mean,  _ everything?” _ Martin asks.

“I don’t – ask me a question!” Jon says, bouncing on the balls of his feet excitedly. “One I can’t possibly know already.”

“Okay…” Martin hesitates, thinking, and then asks the first question that comes to mind: “What’s my middle name?”

He’s not quite sure what he expects. He’s stuck with the same one for a while now – about a year, give or take an apocalypse, since his mum died. He doesn’t anticipate changing it anytime soon, not least because he simply doesn’t have the time to think about things like that right now with much more important things to worry about, but also because he likes it. He wishes he had found it sooner, really, but then he thinks it would never have had the same meaning if he hadn’t come to it the way he did. 

So that’s it, he thinks, this is as permanent a change as you can get in this brave new world, so he figures that’s probably what will pop into Jon’s head. Some part of him, deep down, thinks that maybe Jon subconsciously – or consciously? – already knows it, from hearing it when he was in his coma.

But of course, nobody knows how any of this stuff works, and so Jon doesn’t get the flash of insight into Martin’s chosen name, but rather receives the knowledge that Martin doesn’t have a middle name in any legal or official capacity, and that’s true enough. Martin is only a little bit bitter that his official legal designation still counts in this hellscape, that he can’t just have something that he chose that is also real.

Then Jon says “I actually believed you!” and Martin’s heart aches to hear it, because – well, because of  _ course _ Jon had believed him. He'd had no reason to think otherwise, at the time. “That’s ridiculous, I thought, that’s not a  _ real _ name, but he wouldn’t  _ lie _ to me!” says Jon, and Martin feels tiny warm flowers blooming in his chest at that, because the idea that Jon thought of him at all back then is still quite gratifying. The idea that Jon cared enough to ask him a question and then ruminate on his answer and concluded that Martin wouldn’t lie to him – that’s a sight better than where he thought their relationship stood at the time.

There’s some guilt, too, of course, and bittersweetness, because he  _ was _ lying to Jon back then – not about his name, but about his whole life. About who he was. And isn’t that worse? That Jon had trusted him like that, even when he didn’t like him, and then that trust had crumbled to ruins in a matter of months? Martin thinks about Jon yelling at him, “Because you keep  _ lying _ to me, Martin!” and he thinks about how nervous he was to be found out.

It all seems kind of small, now that he looks back on it. Middle names and false resumés and drinks at the pub after work and – you know what, fuck it, even Jane Prentiss. It all seems insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The only thing that matters is that he has Jon now, that they’re together now, and that they have moved past all of that.

Still, he finds himself thinking about it over and over throughout the rest of the – not  _ day, _ there are no days here, but for a while, by any measure. He thinks he ought to clear it up for Jon, now that they really do have that trust, now that he can tell Jon anything and have faith that it will be received with love and support. He waits until they’ve stopped to rest for a moment, sitting beside each other on the ground and breathing in the stillness.

“Jon,” he says idly, as if the thought had just occurred to him and hadn’t been bouncing around in his skull and driving him crazy for hours and hours. “You know it  _ is _ a real name, right? I mean, you know that, right?”

“What?” Jon asks, distracted, then shakes himself back into the moment and realizes what Martin is talking about. “Oh. Yeah, I know. I mean, I looked it up after the fact, and besides – I’m not Hindu, but you pick things up. I know these things.”

“You know  _ all  _ things, Jon.”

“That’s beside the point. Are you alright?”

Martin nods his head dismissively, a nervous little gesture that he picked up from years and years and years of telling people he was fine when he was absolutely not fine, and then he remembers that he  _ is _ mostly fine right now, as fine as he can be given the circumstances, that this is just a normal conversation, and that even if something were wrong, Jon would want to know about it. Because Jon is different. Jon is different from everyone Martin has ever known – started out much the same, but Jon learned, unlike most people, and now Jon cares and Jon wants to help when something is wrong and  Jon wants to be his reassurance and his guide, and Martin wants Jon to be that for him.

Jon is the only constant in his life, Martin thinks with a bitter undertone, because of course Jon is the only constant in his life  _ now, _ but even before – Tim was always up and down and Jon was always up and down but they were _there_ and they were the two closest people in the world to him, and then they were both gone, and then Jon came back. And when Jon came back, he was – well, before all that too, he had been sweet and caring, and when he came back and Martin wasn’t himself, Jon never stopped trying to get through to him. 

Jon never gave up on him, but Jon trusted him enough to step back and let him play out the plan that he was enacting, and it worked – sort of. Martin can have all the regrets he wants for not stabbing Jonah Magnus in his stupid decrepit body, but the bottom line is that Martin did succeed in preventing the specific disaster that he had been trying to prevent. It just so happened that another disaster followed soon on its heels, which Martin could have prevented but didn’t, because he didn’t know to try.

Regardless, Jon doesn’t blame him for that. Jon is too busy blaming himself, and he wouldn’t blame Martin anyway, because he believes in Martin to a frightening degree. It almost feels like – well, it doesn’t, at all, because it’s so different and so much better; Jon cares so deeply for him, they’re in love and neither of them was manipulated or coerced into the relationship, but still – it  _ almost _ feels like it felt when Peter put all that faith in him, when he said Martin was the only one who could save the world. Peter was all  _ false glorious promises of spring, _ and Jon is… Jon is the moon.

Jon depends on him, but not like Peter did. Jon doesn’t expect or ask anything of him that he wouldn’t feel comfortable either giving or denying, not the way Peter did, but… Jon believes in him so deeply that it almost, almost, almost makes Martin feel like the world is on his shoulders all over again. Only the load is so much lighter, a gift rather than a burden. He’s happy to carry Jon’s world – after all, Jon is firmly in possession of his, so it’s only fair, really.

“I’m fine,” Martin says sincerely after a pause that seems to last a year. “I was just thinking – I don’t have a legal middle name, and I’m sure that’s what the Eye was looking at, but if you…” For a moment, he considers just telling Jon, but it feels more intimate – and somehow less vulnerable – to ask Jon to look for himself, so: “If you look a bit deeper? In me, I mean, instead of in the Great Sky Encyclopedia? You might find a different answer.”

Jon frowns for a long time, his brow furrowed in a way that makes Martin want to kiss him silly, but he restrains himself for now. Jon is thinking. He can’t be taking all of this time to find the answer, Martin thinks, it wouldn’t take him more than a second to find it, so what is he doing? And then it hits him, that Jon is trying to prepare himself to dip into Martin’s mind for one fact without seeing anything Martin doesn’t want him to see. It’s consideration, is what it is, and nothing more. 

When Jon is primed and ready, he reaches into Martin’s head, and Martin swears he can feel it, the little pressure at the edges of his skull, the not-quite-painful tug of the information from the depths of him. “Oh,” Jon says when he finds it, a sweet, surprised little sound. “Oh, that’s nice. That’s very nice. I like it.”

“Did you see anything else?” Martin asks, then rushes to clarify, “I don’t mean like, were you snooping, I know you weren’t. I just mean – did you get just the name, or did you get details?”

“Just the name,” Jon replies with a sigh of relief. “I could have dug for the details, but I didn’t exactly have permission to do that, and the more I dig, the more likely it is that I come across something I shouldn’t know, and besides… I’d much rather hear the details from you. If you’d like to share, that is.”

“Of course,” Martin smiles. "My parents gave me a family name from my dad's side. Plain. Boring. Even apart from the whole gender thing, it just always felt wrong."

Jon gives him a matching little smile, warm and a bit sad. "No surprise it wasn't right for you," he says. "Plain and boring. That's not you at all."

Martin chuckles fondly under his breath at what he assumes is a flattering lie. "Maybe it was  _ too _ right, and that was the problem," he suggests as he thinks about it some more. "I didn't  _ want _ to be plain and boring, but I  _ was, _ and I wanted to be something... more. Strong, important. Exciting."

"And you are," Jon says without a second of hesitation or uncertainty.

"No," Martin shakes his head gravely, a small self-deprecating smile pulling at the corners of his lips. "I mean, if you need proof that I'm boring – before I ever thought about my gender, I always wished I was called  _ Jane, _ or  _ Mary, _ because I idealized lonely little girls in books. Those were my desired names, as opposed to the dull name I already had."

"That's –," Jon cuts himself off to breathe a soft laugh through his nose. "We all have fixations as children. It's not boring to want to share a name with someone you admire. Even if it's a rather common name – they've got exciting lives, haven't they? Maybe that's what you were really wishing for."

"Maybe," Martin says thoughtfully, not mentioning that his  _ fixations  _ didn’t end after childhood. Jon knows, Jon understands. If there’s anything Jon can relate to, it’s escapism through literature; they bonded over it even back when Jon had a hard time holding a cordial conversation with him.

"Hey, if you want boring," Jon prods him in the ribs and gives him a wry grin, "I named myself  _ Jonathan. _ Any name in the world, I could have picked, and I went with one that, until 2005, hadn't dropped out of the top one hundred boy names in England for over fifty years."

Martin barks out a short laugh, jarring in the small, quiet bubble of their closeness. “Sorry, love, but have you looked up the statistics on  _ Martin?” _ he asks incredulously. “My tastes didn’t exactly get more creative with age.”

Grabbing his attention with a firm, calming hand on his bicep, Jon furrows his brow up at Martin. “Hey,” he murmurs softly, “it’s perfect. And you’re supposed to be telling me the middle name story, remember?”

“Right,” Martin replies with a grateful smile. “Best start at the beginning, I guess. You know the book, right? I’ve told you about the book before, definitely.”

“Yeah,” says Jon. “Yeah, I’ve never read it, but I know the basics.”

“Okay, good. So, I read it for the first time when I was… six? Seven, maybe?” Martin pauses to think before deciding it isn’t all that important. “Young enough that I shouldn’t have been allowed to read something like that, but my parents weren’t exactly the sheltering type. I read it and I decided that I wanted to be M.K. Blackwood, and that was what led me to Martin, eventually.”

Jon hums a small sound of acknowledgment, leaning into Martin’s side and resting his head on his shoulder. Martin wraps an arm around him before continuing his story, taking Jon through all the various K names he tried over the years, and the words come easier to him than he expected. He’s embarrassed to reveal so much about himself, but it’s  _ Jon, _ so he pushes through and bares it all.

When he gets to Keats, Jon chuckles softly at the name, not unkindly. Martin tells him about his conversation with Tim, though it hurts to drudge it up, to remember what they had; it would be a disservice to Tim and to the story if Martin left that part out. Jon just sits and listens the whole time, his eyes wide and curious, furrowing his brow or pursing his lips at certain points.

The last part is the hardest, of course, and Martin finds himself choking up several times when he talks about losing his mother, losing Tim, losing Jon. He tells Jon about the hospital visit and his voice is thick with the threat of tears, but he manages to keep from breaking down entirely long enough to get past the worst of it, and then the rest of the story comes easily.

“Anyway, I’m not sure – I mean, I don’t really know if it’s _permanent,_ you know,” he says once he’s finished, “but it feels right for right now. And it’s not really my top priority while we’re trying to save the world.”

“Still, though,” Jon tells him, all understanding, “if you feel like changing it, that’s your right. No matter how many other important things are going on.”

“I know, I know, it’s just –” Martin hesitates, figuring out his words before he says, “I’m not exactly concerned with myself at the moment.”

Jon’s reply is swift and sure, accompanied by a fierce expression and a burning gaze. “You should be. I am.”

Martin bites his lip to suppress a smile. “Well, I’m concerned with _you.”_

“You’ve got my back, I’ve got yours,” Jon murmurs.

“Yeah,” Martin replies, barely more than a breath, “always.”

_ We are on the moon at last, _ he thinks, awestruck by the sheer uncanny joy of the moment. It’s surreal, the giddy feeling bubbling up in his chest as he sits on the ground with Jon in the middle of an unending nightmare kingdom, but it also feels right. That the whole world ended just when they found each other, that this hellscape is their home after the fire, and that Martin would rather be here with Jon than anywhere else without him.

“Oh, Jon,” he says softly, “we are so happy.”


End file.
